STIFF-FLOP in the News

Taking inspiration from the realm of soft-bodied animals, a European-wide team of engineers, biologists and surgeons coordinated by roboticists at King’s College London have made new ground in the framework of EU project STIFF-FLOP (STIFFness controllable Flexible and Learnable manipulator for surgical OPerations) creating soft and stiffness-controllable robotic devices specifically for minimally-invasive surgery. Here, a…

RoboSoft Newsletter with latest news from King’s CoRe

RoboSoft is a Coordination Action for Soft Robotics funded by the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies – FET- Open Scheme (FP7-ICT-2013-C project # 619319). The March 2015 newsletter which also contains latest progress of the CoRe’s inflatable manipulator can be found here. Cela peut donc avoir des conséquences sur la véritable action du…

IEEE Spectrum: Enhanced Haptic Feedback Replace Surgeons’ Sense of Touch at King’s CoRe

IEEE Spectrum recently reported about haptic feedback solutions for minimally invasive surgery proposed by world-leading research groups. The article mentions the work  that the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe) led by robotics expert Prof. Kaspar Althoefer at King’s College London has devised a system that tracks the probe’s spatial position, how deeply it indents the tissue, and the…

Service Robots – Flexible Helpers in Professional Use at CoRe

Service robotics in Europe is on the rise. The market entrance of Google, the establishment of the “Robo-Stox” index in 2013, special reports in magazines such as “The Economist” or “Der Spiegel” show it: service robotics is on the threshold of entering a new maturity level. Service robotics conquers new, commercial fields of application and…

ICRA 2014 Workshop on Soft and Stiffness-controllable Robots for MIS

This workshop aims to bring together medical experts active in the field of minimally invasive surgery and roboticists creating and studying soft and stiffness controllable robot devices. We will explore the synergies that will arise from robotic surgeons cooperating with such modern robots to conduct advanced surgical interventions previously not possible. This ICRA 2014 workshop…

Huge Media Interest: Why octopus arms don’t stick together?

“Octopus arms have a built-in mechanism that prevents the suckers from grabbing octopus skin,” says Guy Levy (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), the lead author of the work, which appears today in Current Biology. Their article has received a huge interest from the media such as Nature, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, IBT, The Scientist, National…